Random freezes with windows 7 - 64 bit

Gotta laugh... just read this thread in its entirety. Even Mike the Microlimp Engineer gave up on this one.. hasnt posted in this thread since Nov 10th..

I see a lot of similarities and a lot of differences in this thread, and mine is different but the same...

I am getting random freezing, but its not the whole computer freezing. I just lose the ability to input..

If I am playing all in a music folder, Media Player will happily go through every track, until it runs out of tracks.. If I set it to repeat I am sure it would play indefinitely. Once it runs out of tracks though, I cant click on my music folders to add more...

I can be playing an online game and all is working just fine within the java applet.. but then go to the taskbar to open a second window to check the weather, and I find the taskbar is not LEFT clickable. Try to close Firefox and therefore the game by clicking the X, and I cant close the window.. the X is no longer clickable. Click back within the applet and I can still play the game! Bizarre though, I can sometimes close the window by right clicking on the taskbar and then left clicking the close window option on the right click menu.. but often I cant left click the option either! The right click works just fine, every time.

This often happens within 30 seconds of a restart too... I get just one click on the taskbar then my mouse stops functioning.. so I open a window in Firefox but cant click on anything...

I am at a loss to find a cause. I note that AVG has been blamed.. havent tried anything else on this brand new i7 yet but I have AVG 9.

I note that Firefox has been blamed. I use Firefox, but I get the same problem with IE.

I've tried various mouses too, including wireless and wired.

Within an hour of getting this machine built, I was overclocking. A friend was heckling me coz he thought his silly AMD junkbox would be quicker! Behold the awesome i7.. successfully got it up to 3.9GHz from its native 2.8GHz with no apparent problems, but the next day the freezing started. OK, maybe as its been suggested also in this thread, its the RAM timings, messed up by the overclocking?

I have reset the RAM timings according to the Asus list, no good.

I have a fix though.. not to solve my problem, but to fix it without restarting. (to restart, I usually have to kill it with the power button as I cant left click the shutdown option!).

I am wondering if the problem is related to explorer.exe    My recovery method, and it works every time, is to ctrl/alt/del to task manager (where the left click DOES work.. because its not affected by explorer??) and kill and restart explorer.exe

For the guys who have been carrying on about the RAM timings.. heres a thought. Lets just say you are right. Windows is intended for the masses, and the most common and heavy user of personal computers (as opposed to those in a business envronment) just happens to be the middle aged housewife, reaching out to the world in the only way she can. How much do you suppose she knows about RAM timings? If it doesnt happen with XP but it does with 7, because 7 is in some way more sensitive to correct RAM timings.... then 7 needs to be made less sensitive. It should be able to compensate for a myriad of potential 'hardware problems' - particularly when its something that can be fixed by adjusting settings - you arent saying the RAM is faulty, just that it has the wrong settings...   Ergo, its 7's fault. This is supposed to be an idiot proof OS for the masses.. if it cant do that then it becomes irrelevant and Linux or Apple will rule the world...

I love 7.. I hope they fix it real soon.

Windows 7 Professional x64

i7 930 2.8GHz

Asus P6T

6G DDR3 1600 Kingston Hyper-X (triple channel)

9800GT silent pipe (fanless) x2 - SLI linked  * these things are huge but they run at less than 50C and this is the quietest PC I have ever owned*

150GB WD 10000rpm Raptor   System drive

1TB WD 7200rpm Data drive

3DMARK06   32112 o/c @ 3.935 GHz  plenty in reserve :)

I think your issue is something entirely different. I consider a freeze something a little unrecoverable, nonetheless uninstall avg and try again...as I reported it is most likely the cause, (anti virus software). I would love to hear if that solves your issue.

ALSO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR MOTHERBOARD SET TO S1...it worked for me.

Like I have already stated, this appears to be a Windows 7 64-bit issue.  It has nothing to do with changing voltages or wired or wireless cards, drivers or anything else like that. When my system freezes I am unable to access the Task Manager and am forced to press the restart button. I use a Gigabyte motherboard not Asus.  It is not infection either - I have tested this on a cleanly installed system and still get same problems. I also use an NVIDIA graphics card so sadly this has nothing to do with ATi either.

What I have experienced is something extremely unusual - system kept freezing at random (remember this is on a clean system), however I always install all drivers and have uTorrent installed from the beginning. Sometimes Windows would say that my graphics driver had stopped responding - so I uninstalled that and then allowed Windows to install the one from the updates website, but still same problems.

The last time my system froze, I shut down uTorrent - and now I have had no problems for quite a few hours.  I looked on the web and found similar issues but even with BitTorrent and other programs of the like. Unusual problem I know but so far this seems to be the solution for me.

However, I regret to inform you all that I have also had this same problem on a number of customers systems and they didn't even have uTorrent, BitTorrent, etc.  They did however all have Windows 7 64-bit. I am beginning to think this is an incredibly unstable O/s and there is not only one solution to this issue except to reinstall with Windows 7 32-bit which is what I am going to do (and extremely annoyed since I have 8GB of RAM which I will no longer be able to use!).

With regrets that means my previous solutions have not worked - or at least they seemed to work for about a day! - however that does not mean they won't work on some systems.

Gotta laugh... just read this thread in its entirety. Even Mike the Microlimp Engineer gave up on this one.. hasnt posted in this thread since Nov 10th..

I see a lot of similarities and a lot of differences in this thread, and mine is different but the same...

I am getting random freezing, but its not the whole computer freezing. I just lose the ability to input..

If I am playing all in a music folder, Media Player will happily go through every track, until it runs out of tracks.. If I set it to repeat I am sure it would play indefinitely. Once it runs out of tracks though, I cant click on my music folders to add more...

I can be playing an online game and all is working just fine within the java applet.. but then go to the taskbar to open a second window to check the weather, and I find the taskbar is not LEFT clickable. Try to close Firefox and therefore the game by clicking the X, and I cant close the window.. the X is no longer clickable. Click back within the applet and I can still play the game! Bizarre though, I can sometimes close the window by right clicking on the taskbar and then left clicking the close window option on the right click menu.. but often I cant left click the option either! The right click works just fine, every time.

This often happens within 30 seconds of a restart too... I get just one click on the taskbar then my mouse stops functioning.. so I open a window in Firefox but cant click on anything...

I am at a loss to find a cause. I note that AVG has been blamed.. havent tried anything else on this brand new i7 yet but I have AVG 9.

I note that Firefox has been blamed. I use Firefox, but I get the same problem with IE.

I've tried various mouses too, including wireless and wired.

Within an hour of getting this machine built, I was overclocking. A friend was heckling me coz he thought his silly AMD junkbox would be quicker! Behold the awesome i7.. successfully got it up to 3.9GHz from its native 2.8GHz with no apparent problems, but the next day the freezing started. OK, maybe as its been suggested also in this thread, its the RAM timings, messed up by the overclocking?

I have reset the RAM timings according to the Asus list, no good.

I have a fix though.. not to solve my problem, but to fix it without restarting. (to restart, I usually have to kill it with the power button as I cant left click the shutdown option!).

I am wondering if the problem is related to explorer.exe    My recovery method, and it works every time, is to ctrl/alt/del to task manager (where the left click DOES work.. because its not affected by explorer??) and kill and restart explorer.exe

For the guys who have been carrying on about the RAM timings.. heres a thought. Lets just say you are right. Windows is intended for the masses, and the most common and heavy user of personal computers (as opposed to those in a business envronment) just happens to be the middle aged housewife, reaching out to the world in the only way she can. How much do you suppose she knows about RAM timings? If it doesnt happen with XP but it does with 7, because 7 is in some way more sensitive to correct RAM timings.... then 7 needs to be made less sensitive. It should be able to compensate for a myriad of potential 'hardware problems' - particularly when its something that can be fixed by adjusting settings - you arent saying the RAM is faulty, just that it has the wrong settings...   Ergo, its 7's fault. This is supposed to be an idiot proof OS for the masses.. if it cant do that then it becomes irrelevant and Linux or Apple will rule the world...

I love 7.. I hope they fix it real soon.

Windows 7 Professional x64

i7 930 2.8GHz

Asus P6T

6G DDR3 1600 Kingston Hyper-X (triple channel)

9800GT silent pipe (fanless) x2 - SLI linked  * these things are huge but they run at less than 50C and this is the quietest PC I have ever owned*

150GB WD 10000rpm Raptor   System drive

1TB WD 7200rpm Data drive

3DMARK06   32112 o/c @ 3.935 GHz  plenty in reserve :)

Alright guys, I am not a  pro at this, but according to other websites forums and what I found here the S1 - S3 and Auto settings were mentioned as well as AVG and the power settings. Although I did try using the high power settings in windows without any sleep or hybrid sleep option enabled (and this did solve the crash or freeze) It is highly unpractical. I supposed if you wanna leave your machine running all the time and manually turn off your moniter this could be the resolution.

However, I did start messing around with the sleep timer and set it to 1 min for testing. I had avg installed on the first test with my mobo set to auto for the s1 and s3 modes and on the first test after 1 min when it went to sleep it locked up or froze when i woke up the machine. That is to say upon waking it it crashed. I then uninstalled avg and changed the bios setting to s1 upon the reboot that avg required for uninstalling it. Suprisingly as soon as i let the min go by and it go into the sleep mode it solved the issue.

Im going to try the hybrid settings and see if it solved that, and try reverting ATI catalyst software back to factory defaults. One other thing I did with the ATI software is I changed the AI to off. Hope this helps guys...

This is with an ASUS mobo...specs are here as listed.

ATI 5850 Graphics card and windows is installed on a 10,000 rpm hd

System Type    x64-based PC

Processor    AMD Phenom(tm) 9650 Quad-Core Processor, 2300 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)

BIOS Version/Date    American Megatrends Inc. 1210, 6/26/2009

SMBIOS Version    2.5

Windows Directory    C:\Windows

System Directory    C:\Windows\system32

Boot Device    \Device\HarddiskVolume2

Locale    United States

Hardware Abstraction Layer    Version = "6.1.7600.16385"

User Name    M4712ix-PC\M4712ix

Time Zone    Central Daylight Time

Installed Physical Memory (RAM)    6.00 GB

Total Physical Memory    6.00 GB

Available Physical Memory    4.67 GB

Total Virtual Memory    12.0 GB

Available Virtual Memory    10.4 GB

Page File Space    6.00 GB

Page File    C:\pagefile.sys

Update, after those changes were made I restored the basic settings under power management making sure they were set to default, then under the main screen I set the monitor and the computer sleep options to be set to 1 min for further testing this worked. When I woke the machine it didn't freeze. This seems to have solved it thus far, now i am restoring ati catalyst software to defaults to see if that is still compatible (AI on)

Yep has nothing to do with the catalyst software, or the power settings, its AVG and the mobo setting to S1: heck, could even be AVG all together...I noticed there were a few other bugs it was causing as well.